Albert
Einstein (1879-1955) -
Physicist. He was a man who did not finish high school and had
difficulty finding a job after leaving school, but went on to explain
relationships between light and mass, light and movement.
Albert Einstein was born into a German family with "distant Jewish ancestry". He was a quiet boy who didn't talk until after he was three years old. As a teen, he became bored and disenchanted with school, so dropped out. Einstein was 26 and working at a patent office when he submitted his first scientific paper on the structure of light. That paper marked his career as one of history's best known and respected physicists.
Einstein's findings, resulting from reassessment of well known research and experiments, went on to become known as The Theory of Relativity (the relationship between moving bodies and bodies at rest). By 1933, his work allowed him to recognize the relationship between energy and mass, represented by the simple but fundamental equation, E=mc.
Einstein was primarily a physicist, but was also a humanist, a political activist, a war time pacifist, and a family man. His respected position allowed him relatively safe haven to publicly denounce the Jewish persecution during WWI. Einstein left Germany in 1932, settling at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ. He eventually became a citizen of the United States where he continued his work against the war, and for physics, everywhere.
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
(1996). A. Einstein Image and Impact.
[WWWdocument].
URL
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/index.html